Children's understanding of belief as a normative concept

The variety of accounts of theory of mind development, arising from distinct theoretical perspectives, have focused on children's causal-explanatory views on the mind and have not developed accounts of children's normative judgments of the mental domain. This review maintains that such a focus is unfortunate and leaves our understanding of belief as a concept incomplete. First, by presenting an alternative framework that treats belief as a normative concept, this account discusses the central importance of children's understanding of epistemic justification and their appreciation of the normative significance of others’ reasons for belief. Next, this review of the relevant theory of mind literature proposes a new way of thinking about the findings of various domains in this field and gives particular attention to prior work on false belief, origins or sources of belief, and the distinctions between fantastical and epistemic states. On the basis of this review, it is concluded that in order to accurately assess the development of the concept of belief, further research is required on children's views of how beliefs ought to be formed, their evaluation of justified and unjustified believers, and the notions of duty or responsibility they associate with epistemic agents.     

At the boundaries of automaticity: negation as reflective operation

The present research investigated whether automatic social-cognitive skills are based on the same representations and processes as their controlled counterparts. Using the cognitive task of negating valence, the authors demonstrate that enhanced practice in negating the valence of a stimulus can lead to changes in the underlying associative representation. However, procedural, rule-based components of negations were generally unaffected by practice (Experiments 1-3). Moreover, negations of evaluative stimuli did not influence automatic evaluative responses to these stimuli, unless the negation was included in the associative representation of a stimulus (Experiments 4-6). These results suggest that some practice-related skill improvements are limited to conditions in which a general procedure can be substituted by the retrieval of results of previous applications from associative memory. Implications for research on automaticity and social cognition are discussed.     

Children's understanding of mental states as causes of emotions

Theory of mind studies of emotion usually focus on children's ability to predict other people's feelings. This study examined children's spontaneous references to mental states in explaining others' emotions. Children (4‐, 6‐ and 10‐year‐olds, n = 122) were told stories and asked to explain both typical and atypical emotional reactions of characters. Because atypical emotional reactions are unexpected, we hypothesized that children would be more likely to refer to mental states, such as desires and beliefs, in explaining them than when explaining typical emotions. From the development of lay theories of emotion, derived the prediction that older children would refer more often to mental states than younger children. The developmental shift from a desire‐psychology to a belief‐psychology led to the expectation that references to desires would increase at an earlier age than references to beliefs. Our findings confirmed these expectations only partly, because the nature of the emotion (happiness, anger, sadness or fear) interacted with these factors. Whereas anger, happiness and sadness mainly evoked desire references, fear evoked more belief references, even in 4‐year‐olds. The fact that other factors besides age can also play an influential role in children's mental state reasoning is discussed. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Children's understanding of reputations

In the present study, the authors investigated age differences in children's understanding (a) that a person's behavior may contribute to the formation of a shared opinion within the peer group and (b) that origins of a reputation can be direct or indirect. The authors read stories in which a target character engaged in either prosocial or antisocial interactions with peers to children in kindergarten, 2nd, and 4th grade. They then asked the children to judge how various peers viewed the target character. Children's explanations indicated that children in all of those age groups understood that firsthand experience influenced peers' opinions, and by 2nd grade, children understood that indirect experience or gossip also might have contributed to an individual's reputation.     

Children's understanding of interpretation

The prevailing view in the study of children's developing theories of mind is that the 4-year-old's newfound understanding of false belief is the single developmental milestone marking entry into an adult “folk psychology.” We argue instead that there are at least two such watershed events. Children first develop a “copy theory” that equates the mind with a recording device capable of producing either faithful or flawed representations of reality and according to which mental states are determined entirely by the flow of information into the mind. Only later, in the early school years, do children come to appreciate, as do adults, that the mind itself can contribute to the content of mental states. This later-arriving “Interpretive Theory of Mind” allows an appreciation of the capacity for constructively interpreting and misinterpreting reality. The main finding from the six studies reported here is that children who otherwise demonstrate a clear understanding that beliefs can be false (and so deserve to be credited with a theory of mind), can nevertheless fail to appreciate even the most basic aspects of interpretation: that despite exposure to precisely the same information, two persons can still end up holding sharply different opinions about what is the self-same reality. What these studies reveal is that an interpretive theory of mind is different from, and later arriving than, an appreciation of the possibility of false belief, and contrary to competing claims, this interpretive theory actually makes its first appearance during, but not before, the early school years.     

Children's understanding of counting

This study examines the abstractness of children's mental representation of counting, and their understanding that the last number word used in a count tells how many items there are (the cardinal word principle). In the first experiment, twenty-four 2- and 3-year-olds counted objects, actions, and sounds. Children counted objects best, but most showed some ability to generalize their counting to actions and sounds, suggesting that at a very young age, children begin to develop an abstract, generalizable mental representation of the counting routine. However, when asked "how many" following counting, only older children (mean age 3.6) gave the last number word used in the count a majority of the time, suggesting that the younger children did not understand the cardinal word principle. In the second experiment (the "give-a-number" task), the same children were asked to give a puppet one, two, three, five, and six items from a pile. The older children counted the items, showing a clear understanding of the cardinal word principle. The younger children succeeded only at giving one and sometimes two items, and never used counting to solve the task. A comparison of individual children's performance across the "how-many" and "give-a-number" tasks shows strong within-child consistency, indicating that children learn the cardinal word principle at roughly 3 1/2 years of age. In the third experiment, 18 2- and 3-year-olds were asked several times for one, two, three, five, and six items, to determine the largest numerosity at which each child could succeed consistently. Results indicate that children learn the meanings of smaller number words before larger ones within their counting range, up to the number three or four. They then learn the cardinal word principle at roughly 3 1/2 years of age, and perform a general induction over this knowledge to acquire the meanings of all the number words within their counting range.     

Children's understanding of inferential knowledge

The understanding of inference as a source of knowledge for 4- and 6-year-old children was investigated. Children and a puppet were shown 2 toys of different colors. The toys were hidden in separate plastic cans. After the puppet looked into 1 of the cans, 6-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, usually judged that the puppet knew the color of the toy in the other can as well. The finding that 6-year-olds attributed inferential knowledge to another observer is interpreted as evidence that children begin to understand the role of cognitive processes in knowledge acquisition around the age of 6 years.     

Children's understanding of posterior probability

Do young children have a basic intuition of posterior probability? Do they update their decisions and judgments in the light of new evidence? We hypothesized that they can do so extensionally, by considering and counting the various ways in which an event may or may not occur. The results reported in this paper showed that from the age of five, children's decisions under uncertainty (Study 1) and judgments about random outcomes (Study 2) are correctly affected by posterior information. From the same age, children correctly revise their decisions in situations in which they face a single, uncertain event, produced by an intentional agent (Study 3). The finding that young children have some understanding of posterior probability supports the theory of naive extensional reasoning, and contravenes some pessimistic views of probabilistic reasoning, in particular the evolutionary claim that the human mind cannot deal with single-case probability.     

Children's understanding of habitual behaviour

Research into the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) has shown how children from a very early age infer other people's goals. However, human behaviour is sometimes driven not by plans to achieve goals, but by habits, which are formed over long periods of reinforcement. Habitual and goal‐directed behaviours are often aligned with one another but can diverge when the optimal behavioural policy changes without being directly reinforced (thus specifically hobbling the habitual learning strategy). Unlike the flexibility of goal‐directed behaviour, rigid habits can cause agents to persist in behaviour that is no longer adaptive. In the current study, all children predict agents will tend to behave consistently with their goals, but between the ages of 5 and 10, children showed an increasing understanding of how habits can cause agents to persistently take suboptimal actions. These findings stand out from the typical way the development of social reasoning is examined, which instead focuses on children's increasing appreciation of how others' beliefs or expectations affect how they will act in service of their goals. The current findings show that children also learn that under certain circumstances, people's actions are suboptimal despite potentially ‘knowing better.’     

Children's understanding of drivers' intentions

To become more skilled as pedestrians, children need to acquire a view of the traffic environment as one in which road users are active agents with different intentions and objectives. This paper describes a simulation study designed to explore children's understanding of drivers' intentions. It also investigated the effect of training children's sensitivity, through peer discussion and adult guidance, to the cues by which drivers signal their intentions. Results confirmed that children's ability to accurately predict drivers' intentions improves with age and that sensitizing children through training to the options for action available to drivers when signalling a manoeuvre improves their accuracy in predicting drivers' intentions. Training was also found to shift children's focus from contextual infrastructural features of the traffic environment (e.g. traffic signals, stop signs) by which to judge drivers' likely intentions to the explicit cues that drivers use to signal their imminent actions (e.g. slowing down, moving into the kerb). Training on the simulation was also shown to transfer to practical decision making at the roadside.     

Children's understanding of ownership transfers

An understanding of ownership entails the recognition that ownership can be transferred permanently and the ability to differentiate legitimate from illegitimate transfers. Two experiments explored the development of this understanding in 2-, 3-, 4- and 5-year olds, using stories about gift-giving and stealing. The possibility that children use simple biases to identify owners, such as a first possessor, current possessor or a loan bias, was also investigated. Five-year olds appropriately acknowledged a permanent transfer of ownership in the case of giving but not stealing. Four-year olds allowed permanent transfers but struggled to differentiate legitimate from illegitimate transfers. Many 4-year olds allowed adults, but not children, to keep property that had been stolen. Two- and 3-year olds exhibited a first possessor bias for both stories. We conclude that, by 5 years of age, children possess a mature understanding of ownership transfer whereas younger children are prone to biases.     

Another negation of negation

In discussing questions of free will, Soviet philosophers fail to distinguish conditions from causes. This makes them unable to understand the very opponents they like to criticize.     

Children's understanding of death as the cessation of agency: a test using sleep versus death

An important problem faced by children is discriminating between entities capable of goal-directed action, i.e. intentional agents, and non-agents. In the case of discriminating between living and dead animals, including humans, this problem is particularly difficult, because of the large number of perceptual cues that living and dead animals share. However, there are potential costs of failing to discriminate between living and dead animals, including unnecessary vigilance and lost opportunities from failing to realize that an animal, such as an animal killed for food, is dead. This might have led to the evolution of mechanisms specifically for distinguishing between living and dead animals in terms of their ability to act. Here we test this hypothesis by examining patterns of inferences about sleeping and dead organisms by Shuar and German children between 3 and 5-years old. The results show that by age 4, causal cues to death block agency attributions to animals and people, whereas cues to sleep do not. The developmental trajectory of this pattern of inferences is identical across cultures, consistent with the hypothesis of a living/dead discrimination mechanism as a reliably developing part of core cognitive architecture.     

Children's understanding of emotion in dance

This study investigated children's understanding of emotion in dance movements. Professional dancers were instructed to improvise on the emotions of joy, anger, fear, and sadness and to transform these improvisations into short solo dances, which were recorded on video. Eight performances were selected for use as stimuli. Children, aged 4, 5, and 8 years, and adults watched these performances and indicated which of the four emotions they perceived in the respective performance. All age groups achieved recognition scores well above chance level. As a rule, 4-year-olds' recognition was inferior to that of the other age groups, but in some cases either girls or boys of this age achieved as good a recognition as one or more of the other age groups. The 5-year-old children achieved recognition levels close to those obtained for 8-year-olds and adults. A cue analysis based on the Laban movement analysis suggested that force and tempo in movement were the key factors for emotion recognition.     

Children's understanding of motives for deception

This study examines the problem of why some motives are understood at an earlier age than others. Currently, the accepted explanation for this is that general cognitive level constrains children's reasoning in the social domain. An alternative explanation is that an important process in understanding others is projection. To investigate this young boys and girls from two age groups were presented with cartoon stories depicting situations involving altruistic deception and self-centred deception. Pairs of matched cartoon stories, each of which came in two versions, differing only in motive type were constructed. As predicted, self-centred deception was understood earlier than altruistic deception. These results are congruent with the idea that the underlying process in understanding others is projection.     

Children's understanding of the Ulysses conflict

Two studies explored children's understanding of how the presence of conflicting mental states in a single mind can lead people to act so as to subvert their own desires. Study 1 analyzed explanations by children (4--7 years) and adults of behaviors arising from this sort of 'Ulysses conflict' and compared them with their understanding of conflicting desires in different minds, as well as with changes of mind within an individual across time. The data revealed that only the adults were able to adequately explain the Ulysses conflict. Study 2 asked children (4--7 years) and adults to choose among three explicitly presented competing explanations for self-subverting behaviors. The results suggest that an understanding of the influence of conflicting mental states on behaviors does not occur until at least 7 years of age.     

Children's early understanding of false belief

We investigated 3-year-olds' understanding of the representational capability of the mind by examining whether they would acknowledge that they had entertained a wrong belief. As in previous studies, children very often judged that they had believed a Smarties tube contained pencils when these were revealed as the true content, even though they had stated "Smarties" before the tube had been opened. Under another condition, when the tube was first presented, children mailed a picture into a postbox of what they thought was inside (Smarties). When asked "When you posted your picture, what did you think was in here (the tube)?" the great majority of children answered correctly with "Smarties". Additionally, children nearly always stated that the posted card displayed a picture of Smarties, and that the tube really contained pencils. On the traditional task, children may give the wrong answer because they are biased to make judgments about belief states on the basis of known physical reality. The posting task made it possible for children simultaneously to focus on physical reality and acknowledge false belief.